How can I build a tar from stdin?

Question

How can I pipe information into tar specifying the names of the file?

Answer 1

As already pointed out by geekosaur, there is no need to pipe the output of find to xargs because it is possible to pipe the output of find directly to tar using find ... -print0 | tar --null ....

Note the slight differences between gnutar and bsdtar in excluding the archive file though.

# exclude file.tar.gz anywhere in the directory tree to be tar'ed and compressed
find . -print0 | gnutar --null --exclude="file.tar.gz" --no-recursion -czf file.tar.gz --files-from -
find . -print0 | bsdtar --null --exclude="file.tar.gz" -n -czf file.tar.gz -T -

# bsdtar excludes ./file.tar.gz in current directory by default
# further file.tar.gz files in subdirectories will get included though
# bsdtar: ./file.tar.gz: Can't add archive to itself
find . -print0 | bsdtar --null -n -czf file.tar.gz -T -

# gnutar does not exclude ./file.tar.gz in current directory by default
find . -print0 | gnutar --null --no-recursion -czf file.tar.gz --files-from -